KipV

I would rather that Affinity do a few things really well rather then attempt too many things and fail. Part of the problem with Adobe is that they have cast their net so wide that they seem incapable of putting out great updates in a timely manner. Too many different areas and too many platforms.

Glad to have the file name stay there when you go to save as. Would it be possible to fix the disappearing tags as well in this beta? Right now the tags in a file will vanish when you go to save as. It would also be very nice to have the name and tags pop up when you click the file name in the title bar like in other programs. Other then that good updates and I am excited to try Affinity Photo.

The web features you mentioned are probably what I care the least about bringing over to AD. Sketch already does a good job at that and I don't think that web layout design should be AD's main focus. The infinite canvas is just as valuable to any kind of illustration work so I could see that being brought across.

Time for a new computer.

For some reason the attachment icon started showing up again. I didn't log out it just came up again. One problem I am still having is I won't get notified when someone replies to me. I noticed that you posted this four days ago but I didn't know about until today when I just wanted to scan through this thread and see what new things people were posting.

It seems like Apple is rethinking the file system; trying new ways of doing things, and jettisoning ideas that didn't work well. I would expect them to have some sort of replacement to the Finder. Spotlight seems to be getting the first major interface change in a decade maybe that will gradually become the Finder's replacement. We have Apple rethinking their OSs and third parties like Affinity also rethinking traditional ways of dealing with files. It is pretty exciting times.

The single file technique gets more interesting the more I think about it. When I was in school we would set up a folder hierarchy for a project where you would have a InDesign file in the first folder and then would have to make folders inside that folder for photos, drawings, fonts, etc. If everything is self contained the folder hierarchy doesn't seem as important anymore. Now that a lot of the cloud formats are moving away from the deeply nested folder structures this type of format would work a lot better.

"A better scenario might be it holds the colour until you paste it either on an existing point or a new point." That is a good point. Add a paste button in case you want to replace a preexisting stop. "The end point doesn't currently have the ability in the gradient panel to be copied, this isn't ideal especially if that's the colour you need" Yes, the paste button might fix this whole problem and like you said there would need to be a way to copy and paste stops with the gradient canvas tool.

Yeah, there is a bit of a consistency issue going on. Also I am not totally clear why there can't be a swatch at the end of the gradient bar. In iDraw having no swatch at the end doesn't mean that there should be no colour there but that the color closest to the end fills that space in. I am not sure if anything is wrong with doing it that way. I like this since you can keep both the middle and the (former) end colours while you are still in the process of juggling around where the colours final placement should be.

Andy, I noticed something interesting when you use the canvas gradient tool. With the canvas gradient tool you can drag one colour on top of the other just like you said the colour that gets dragged over replaces the colour that was there previously. If you try to do the same thing with the gradient tools on the color button on the top tool bar the old colour doesn't leave. The furthest you can drag the swatch is to the 99% position. The ability to drag a middle colour all the way to 100% and replace the old colour is a much better way to do it. I can see some instances where I would like to swap the positions of the end point with the mid point like you can do with Illustrator, iDraw, etc.

Ok Andrew, I will continue the conversation after you move the thread over to "Questions".

This is part 2 of yesterday's gradient post that is now locked. I just want to mention a couple more things that I didn't get a chance to do. Matt, My problem is I will often make a colour in the middle and then realize it needs to go on the end. Right now I am working on an illustration where I need three shades for the same colour. A darker part for the shadows and a brighter spot for the highlights. The way I have been doing it is I start with the midrange colour and then drag it to one end for the highlight and then to the other side for the shadow but the way it is set up now you can't really do that. When you drag one colour to the end the previous colour at the end still stays there and it is very difficult to delete the original end colour. I found that I end up having to recreate the colours on the ends. This should be a quick drag and drop procedure with just a slight alternation to the colour's brightness. One way to do this would be if the middle colour could replace the colour at the end but then there might be some instances where you wanted to keep the end colour too. It would be nice if we could converse on this issue a little before closing it please. There might be some compromise between what I am saying and what you are saying. I can understand what you were trying to do with the canvas bar maybe we can figure something out. It is the only area I have come across in Affinity Designer that acts clunky. Just about every other feature in the program seems to be executed fantastically.

I expect mobile to happen long before Windows happens (if Windows happens). If you look at programs like iDraw they managed to achieve making a product on iPad that is almost exactly as powerful as it is on the Mac especially with the upcoming version 2.1 that they announced yesterday. I don't see a really big need for the developers to rush out an iPad version of Affinity as iDraw actually is a pretty good Mac to iPad solution. Now getting a really good replacement for Illustrator / Freehand is something that the Mac desperately needs.

That's a great point about waiting to see how the product matures before making too many decisions about it. What we seeing right now is that staying single platform has worked for many companies at the moment and we will have to know what future OSes will be like before seeing how viable multiplatform support is in the long term.

There is actually a lot of doubt. They spent that time writing nearly identical software for both Mac and Windows. Now they are taking on far more then two platforms and the platforms are very different from each other. Heck even Mac and Windows are not that much alike anymore. On top of that you add web app platforms and touch platforms. It sounds like what you want is to have Adobe do extra work developing on multiple radically different platforms and yet not pay more for it. How is that a viable business strategy for them? Affinity doesn't take on so much so they don't have to pay 11,000 people and inflate their prices. I would like to get ice cream delivered to me in the mail but I realize that is never going to happen and I adjust my expectations around the situation at hand.

.... or EVER go to the other side maybe. Companies like OmniGroup have proved that you can have a great business for several decades on end by being Apple only. Omni focuses on leading Mac business software and Affinity could possibly take the same route as being the graphics version of Omni. Maybe they don't expand to other platforms and just gradually keep building the product line. If Affinity starts to go cross platform they then become more Adobe like which makes you wonder what the differential advantage with Adobe would be. If they stuck with the same narrow focus the benefits over Adobe would be obvious. The later choice would be the wisest in my opinion. It's hard to compete cross platform with an established company that has saturated every platform.

“Then one still needed to exchange data with colleagues, who sit in front of another os.” That is what all the cloud based services are for. If you are on an iPad save the work to iCloud Drive and open the iCloud Drive app on your PC for an example. “There is exactly one cross platform offering in the 2D graphics field, made by Adobe.” If you had a Mac you could run Affinity and your Windows software at the same time. PCs have more resources then ever these days so running two OSes at a time is a very realistic workflow. “When a CC customer decides to stop paying because the recent development direction is irrelevant for his work – all installed software expires.” Well Adobe needs to pay a lot of employees to make software for a dozen different environments. They can’t pay for all that development when there are customers skipping 2 or 3 product upgrades. They need constant cash flow to to have such a broad level of support. Why do I need to pay someone to make editing tools for my cellphone? Why do I need to pay someone to develop for Windows 8 when most Windows users are on Windows 7? This is the challenge that Adobe is doing these days. They have this idea that we have all these platforms so we have to develop for all of them. This seems bonkers to me and many others here and is a questionable long term strategy for the company. “Other files as written by Indesign, Adobe's video editing products or Web-Editors can't get opened with anything else. One essentially loses access to all work files.” Yep, this is why some have switched to Final Cut (which is better optimized for Mac hardware like the new Mac Pro), iBooks Author (which ID has played catch up to in the version that they just announced yesterday. Just look at the HTML animation tool that has been in iBooks Author for the last year or two.) I am not heavy into the coding part of web editors but I know many people prefer Mac tools like Coda, Espresso, etc. over Dreamweaver. I am currently looking at some software that might do a good job at creating email ads. If you are willing to try the Mac there are many great graphics titles that deliver lots of free updates without any subscription and great customer support. You’ll have to decide if that is for you or not. I have been happy on the Mac and others here I’m sure feel the same way.

Well if one person really needs to know all that (keeping in mind many people who make job postings don't understand the immensity of what they are asking for in the post and tend to exaggerate the requirements) then I could see a person in that position having a number of choices. They could stay entirely on Windows using Illustrator. Or perhaps with the latest influx of drawing apps on tablets they might prefer to do a drawing on a tablet and then bring it in to the PC to then use with their architecture / 3D software. Maybe they will even have a CAD software on touch screen soon and they could just stay in a touch environment. No, I never said you are seeing things the wrong way, here is a quote from my first post in that other thread: "If you feel that being cross platform is “the right way to do things” then it seems like your ideal set up is already available today." I am just trying to say different software companies are trying different approaches and time will tell what solution works best for the majority of people. Lots of design software is Mac only and lots of software is cross platform. Try the different ways of working and then go with the way that is best for you. I am certainly not trying to suggest that everyone should convert to Mac and start using Affinity Designer because that is "the right way."

Yes, Andy I would find it very useful. I like how with modern OS X apps I can shut my computer down and all the files just close without asking me if I want to save anything and then all the files reopen when I start the computer up again. Having versions would be nice too. Affinity has a great history panel but I believe a file's old versions will still stay around even after closing the file down which would provide additional functionality. I would also like the duplicate, rename, move to, menu options as well as the ability to change the title and tags by clicking on the menu bar.

I just heard about Adobe's big push to support Windows 8 at Adobe MAX. For the proponents of maximum cross platform support they sure are leading the way in that area. I am not sure why we have cross platform people here complaining about Affinity's lack of support when Adobe is giving them support for nearly every OS including even Chrome OS. Personally I am tired of funding platforms I never use which is one reason why I have starting looking elsewhere.

Our company has been entirely based on Windows PCs for doing the manufacturing work and we are a small company. We never do the designing of the products but our role is in helping our customers figure out how they can make their products get manufactured. As far as the promo work at our company I do all the promo work (websites, email ads, trade show displays, posters, ID badges, handout material, mailers, signage, forms, logos, studio photography, business cards, etc) and it doesn't requires any back and forth exchanging of graphics files with anyone else on the team. No else knows how to the graphic design software and even if they did they weren't trained as designers.

First of all it's accusation in the title is silly but even more bizarre is what he says about Sketch. "There is no killer feature that really caught my attention in order to justify why I would use this over something like Sketch." I think almost everyone knows that Sketch isn't really a competitor to Affinity it's more of a compliment. Sketch was setting out to offer a solid replacement for Fireworks and we know that Affinity mostly has it's slight set on Illustrator. It just seems odd that people would vote that as the most helpful review even though it seems to miss the obvious. Seems fishy.

Hifred My family is actually in the CNC machining business and we have purchased some of the five digit software that you are talking about. In fact I put together a webpage that talks about the file formats that we work with: http://caspre.com/design.shtml In our case our programmers are not the ones using Illustrator they just simply need to import the Illustrator file format from our customers. If one of our customers is a Mac user running Affinity Designer our Windows software could potentially open the Affinity Designer file format. This is an example where Affinity's choice in platform in no way hinders this workflow. Now I don't know how many people do both the vector drawing and work on the specialized machining software. It sounds like you are talking about a workflow that is a niche of a niche. Even if a very small number of people work that way the most logical solution for them would be to put Windows on their Mac or get both a Mac and a Windows computer. Yes that would be an extra expense but if the company is buying five digit software spending one or two grand on a computer is pocket change in comparison. I realize that there are some Windows programs that will never get ported over to the Mac. I think that is perfectly fine, in fact it's probably preferable. What you will most likely see these days is a Mac developer will start over with a new product to take on an established Windows program. I think you will generally see a lot more of this happen then you will see people make direct ports. Like I already brought up in that other thread porting made a lot of sense in 1995 but it most cases, not all cases, it generally makes more sense to design a program specifically for that platform. This has become especially true as developers now not only need to develop for a desktop OS but also for it's corresponding touch screen OS. Affinity has a lot of work in head of them to make a graphics suite that competes with Adobe and then at some point make a touch screen version of the software. For them to keep tacking on more and more platforms would make things extremely complex when they already have a big enough job in head of them.

As I understand it Windows at one time was much more popular for 3D artists since the classic Mac OS did a poor job at running 3D illustration programs. I don't think that is an issue anymore with 3D illustration. Developers could potentially bring their software over to the Mac if they wanted to. I don't follow 3D illustration that closely but hasn't that already happened? Have most of the exclusive 3D illustration tools moved over to the Mac now? I mostly work in 2D so I wouldn't know.

Yes, this issue has been brought up and is known by the developers. I am having the same problem on my Intuos 5 and Pro.